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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

The meme here proves nothing to the Fox News audience base.

If you believe there is a planetwide campaign to discredit Fox News, its executives and on-camera actors, it’s going to come as no surprise that they don’t win awards for journalistic excellence.

Shortly before he died, I interviewed Martin Perl, Nobel laureate in physics for his discovery of the tau lepton (kind of like an electron, only different, and totally unlike a boson–comment if you’d like to know more). Now, in the numerous conversations I’ve had with people about this prestigious acknowledgement, I’ve come to know that there are some people who believe that Nobel prizes are handed out for political purposes.  Maybe I’m gullible, but think most of the world’s great awards are based on merit.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

What Trump actually did vis-a-vis train safety regulations is actually not as black and white as the meme here represents, but it’s close.

We all know that, in the United States, the greatest levels of poverty and the poorest levels of education and healthcare are found in states like West Virginia and the Deep South, where Republicans win by huge margins over candidates who offer to makes voters’ lives longer, healthier, and less pathetic.

The problem seems to be that profoundly stupid people simply want leaders who hate liberals and immigrants.

Stories like the train derailment and toxic contamination in Ohio play out in our news cycles with ever-growing frequency.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

A few days ago, when District 73 Texas House Representative (R) Carrie Isaac introduced a bill to ban polling places from college and university campuses, very few people took notice.

That’s because voter suppression in Texas is as common as potatoes in Idaho and corn in Iowa.  Making it difficult for educated people and racial minorities to cast their ballots is an artform in the Lone Star state.

For its retrogression and wanton political corruption, our country is an object of world pity.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

If you want to “fight back” against the “radical left,” Stephen Miller would appreciate your generous donation.

Steve Bannon had a similar organization that also focused on bilking hateful morons; its ostensible purpose was completing the wall of on the U.S. southern border.  He now faces fraud charges for pilfering those funds.

Again, open your wallets and let that cash flow freely to people who prey on idiots.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

At left is the front page of the New York Post, one of Rupert Murdoch’s (formerly) Trump-friendly publications.

Now, of course, Trump’s reaction was predictable: The Post has joined the rest of the fake news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal (!) and Fox News (!!).

What’s yet to be seen, however, is the Trump base’s response to the fact that, one-by-one, even the most irresponsible of the ultra-right-wing rags are throwing the towel in on Trump.

Trump’s demise has been slow and steady; we haven’t seen a major explosion in the form of, say, an indictment out of Georgia, followed by federal charges from special counsel Jack Smith, who appears to be ramping up the pressure here.

All that could change any minute.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The reason we don’t tax religious institutions is not that they don’t make money, but because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that we don’t want “excessive entanglement” between the church and state.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Eventually, Fox News will offer some sort of mealy-mouthed apology for having knowingly lied to its millions of viewers about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.  (It certainly won’t resemble the one at left.)

When Newsmax realized that they were being sued for the exact same type of defamation, they stopped the lies on a dime, issued a fairly robust apology, and ran the other way like a dog with its tail between its legs.  The implication: We have no integrity whatsoever.  In fact, we’re professional liars, but not when it’s going to cost us billions of dollars in compensatory damages, not to mention punitive.  

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

In a recently post, Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, I noted that the criterion that the plaintiff in this defamation suit must prove is “malice,” i.e., that Fox’s continual assertion, one that it knew to be a lie, is that Dominion rigged its voting machines in the 2020 presidential election to covertly “flip” votes that had legitimately been placed for Trump and record them for Biden.

I pointed out that it’s hard to imagine that broadcasting these lies doesn’t meet the level of malice, because of the extreme and deliberate damage they did to the reputation of every employee, and to the financial stature of Dominion.

What I later realized that convincing gullible but heavily armed people that their country’s democracy had been stolen deliberately incited violence.  It’s no secret that the MAGA crowd stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and that death and injury ensued.  Continuing to spew these lies could only have been calculated to cause more mayhem.

Here’s a question for the the U.S. federal government: Don’t you recognize, even vaguely, any responsibility to protect the lives of innocent Americans?  Can’t you stop these bastards?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

From “Fox News Is in a World of Hurt“: When it comes to the burden in this case, it falls on Dominion to prove that Fox acted with actual malice when it claimed that Dominion’s voting machines were designed to rig elections. That burden is typically very difficult to meet, but how far does this filing (that Fox knew its claims were false) go towards meeting it?” (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgments that they make.

Because we’re not computers, we’re all victims of this phenomenon; we have emotions, personal agendas, limited attention spans, peer group pressures, life events that shape our beliefs, and so forth.  Yet some of these are more vicious and less defensible than others.

For example, Fox News has identified a demographic segment of the U.S. population that is especially susceptible to poor thinking, making it particularly vulnerable, and it’s taking full advantage of those weaknesses.

You and I, for example, may have trouble eliminating some our personal prejudices in our thinking.  However, we couldn’t, even we tried, believe the entire U.S. judicial system is corrupt and that it falsely upheld the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, where the true winner was Donald Trump.

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